Shut Your Eyes Tight

He wasn’t sure whether he’d hit the right note of assertiveness and sensitivity until, at the conclusion of a piercing stare, she asked, “Is he all right?”

“Depends on what you mean by all right.”

There was a flicker of something in her expression suggesting that she understood his equivocation.

“He’s in the basement,” Gurney added.

She made a scrunched-up face, nodded, seemed to be picturing something. “With the trains?” Her imperious voice had softened.

“Yes. A regular thing with him?”

She studied the top end of her big stick as though it might be a source of useful information or next steps. She exhibited no interest in answering Gurney’s question.

He decided to nudge the conversation forward from a different angle. “I’m involved in the Perry murder investigation. I remember your name from the list of people who were interviewed back in May.”

She made a contemptuous little sound. “It wasn’t really an interview. I was initially contacted by… I’ll remember the name in a moment… Senior Investigator Hardpan, Hardscrabble, Hard-something… a rough-edged man, but far from stupid. Fascinating in a way-rather like a smart rhinoceros. Unfortunately, he disappeared from the case and was replaced by someone called Blatt, or Splat, or something like that. Blatt-Splat was marginally less rude and far less intelligent. We spoke only briefly, but the brevity was a blessing, believe me. Whenever I meet a man like that, my heart goes out to the teachers who once had to endure him from September to June.”

The comment brought forth a recollection of the words next to the name Marian Eliot on the interview file’s cover sheet: Professor of Philosophy, retired (Princeton).

“In a way that’s why I’m here,” said Gurney. “I’ve been asked to follow up on some of the interviews, get some more detail into the picture, maybe develop a better understanding of what really happened.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “What really happened? You have doubts about that?”

Gurney shrugged. “Some pieces of the puzzle are still missing.”

“I thought the only things missing were the Mexican ax murderer and Carl’s wife.” She seemed both intrigued and annoyed that the situation might not be as she had assumed. The Airedale’s sharp, querying eyes seemed to be taking it all in.

Gurney suggested, “Perhaps we could speak somewhere other than right here?”

Chapter 19

Frankenstein

Marian Eliot’s suggested location for carrying on their conversation was her own home, which happened to be across the lane and a hundred yards back down the hill from Carl Muller’s. The actual location turned out to be not so much her home as her driveway, where she enlisted Gurney’s help unloading bags of peat moss and mulch from the back of her Land Rover.

She’d traded her cudgel for a hoe and stood by the edge of a rose garden about thirty feet from the vehicle. As Gurney hefted the bags into a wheelbarrow, she asked him about his precise role in the investigation and his position in the state police chain of command.

His explanation that he was an “evidence consultant” who’d been retained by the victim’s mother outside the official BCI process was greeted with a skeptical eye and tightened lips.

“What on earth is that supposed to mean?”

He decided to take a chance and reply bluntly. “I’ll tell you what it means if you can keep it to yourself. The fact is, it’s a job description that lets me carry on an investigation without waiting for the state to issue an official PI license. If you want to check on my background as an NYPD homicide detective, call the smart rhinoceros-whose name, by the way, is Jack Hardwick.”

“Hah! Good luck with the state! Do you think you might be able to push that wheelbarrow over here?”

Gurney took that as her way of accepting him and how things were. He made three more trips from the back of the Land Rover to the rose garden. After the third she invited him to sit with her on a white-enameled cast-iron bench under an overgrown apple tree.

She turned so she could look at him squarely. “What’s all this about missing pieces?”

“We’ll come to the missing pieces, but I need to ask a few questions first to help me get oriented.” He was feeling his way toward the right balance of assertiveness and accommodation, watching her body language for signs of needed course corrections. “First question: How would you describe Dr. Ashton in a sentence or two?”

“I wouldn’t try. He’s not the sort of man to be captured in a sentence or two.”

“A complex man?”

“Very.”

“Any predominant personality trait?”

“I wouldn’t know how to answer that.”

Gurney suspected that the quickest means of getting something from Marian Eliot was to stop tugging on it. He sat back and studied the shapes of the apple tree’s branches, twisty from a series of long-ago prunings.

He was right. After a minute she began speaking. “I’ll tell you something about Scott, something he did, but you’ll have to make up your own mind about what it means, whether it would add up to a ‘personality trait.’ ” She articulated the phrase distastefully, as though she found it too simplistic a concept to apply to human beings.

“When Scott was still in medical school, he wrote the book that made him famous-well, famous in certain academic circles. It was called The Empathy Trap. It argued quite cogently-with biological and psychological data to back up his hypothesis-that empathy is essentially a boundary defect, that the empathic feelings human beings have for one another are really a form of confusion. His point was that we care about each other because at some location in the brain we fail to distinguish between self and other. He conducted one elegantly simple experiment in which the subjects watched a man peeling an apple. In the course of peeling it, the man’s hand seemed to slip and the knife jabbed his finger. The subjects were being videotaped for later analysis of their reactions to the jabbing. Virtually all the subjects reflexively flinched. Only two out of the hundred tested failed to have any reaction, and when those two were later given psychological tests, they revealed the mental and emotional characteristics common to sociopaths. Scott’s contention was that we flinch when someone else is cut because for a split second we fail to distinguish between that person and ourselves. In other words, the normal human being’s boundary is imperfect in a way that the sociopath’s is perfect. The sociopath never confuses himself and his needs with anyone else’s and therefore has no feelings related to the welfare of others.”

Gurney smiled. “Sounds like an idea that could stir up a reaction.”

“Oh, indeed it did. Of course, a lot of the reaction had to do with Scott’s choice of words: perfect and imperfect. His language was interpreted by some of his peers as a glorification of the sociopath.” Marian Eliot’s eyes were gleaming with excitement. “But all that was part of his plan. Bottom line, he got the attention he wanted. At the age of twenty-three he was the hottest topic in the field.”

“So he’s smart, and he knows how to-”

“Wait,” she interrupted, “that’s not the end of the story. A few months after his book stirred up that hornet’s nest of controversy, another book was published that was in essence a broadside attack on Scott’s theory of empathy. The title of the competing book was Heart and Soul. It was rigorous and well argued, but its tone was entirely different. Its message was that love is all that matters, and ‘boundary porosity’-as Scott had described empathy-was in fact an evolutionary leap forward and the very essence of human relationships. People in the field were dividing into opposing camps. Journal articles were generated by the score. Impassioned letters were written.” She sat back against the arm of the bench, watching his expression.

“I have a feeling,” said Gurney, “that there’s more.”

“More indeed. A year later it was discovered that Scott Ashton had written both books.” She paused. “What do you think of that?”

“I’m not sure what I think of it. How was it received in his field?”